Avoid These PPC Strategy Mistakes in 2018

The year is almost over and we’re getting into the planning phase for 2018. Before you start banking on anticipated results for next year, it’s important to analyze changes in audience dynamic.

Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results

Most of the time we base our projections on current trends and current or past growth. If our traffic has grown 10% over the last year we might naturally assume at least another 10% growth over the following year, especially considering that we will be optimizing the campaign with keyword modifications, ad copy testing, and other changes that should have a favorable impact.

Unfortunately, this is not an accurate way to calculate projections because overall traffic may slow down, or be altered from other factors.

Don’t Rely Entirely on Digital Insights

Our personal experiences shape our reality, and in turn create a personal bias towards the technologies and processes that we utilize. Naturally, since we are on our phones and computers all the time we will focus on digital data points like conversion rates, impressions, and form submissions.

These insights are spectacular and provide incredibly value data for marketers to use to optimize campaigns, but they don’t tell the whole story.

Consider business to business services as an example. Often times, these services are sold in person or over the phone. Therefore, your digital conversion rate analysis will mask these results and won’t provide you with a true reading on your campaign performance.

Large ticket items, travel, and other products, services, and experiences can also be grouped into this category, where offline sales often happen just as frequently as online sales.

Research Trends in Grouped Sectors

Sometimes products come in pairs, with one complementing the other. This data can be valuable in shaping an idea of what demand will look like in the future.

For instance, an increase in search traffic for “flights to Miami, Florida” will likely be a good indicator of the demand for hotel rooms in Miami, Florida. A retail or eCommerce store may want to analyze products that are often sold together or in sequence. If you are selling cell phone cases, it would be smart to see the overall growth of cell phone sales.

Separate and Segment Your Campaigns

Checking on your overall campaign performance can be useful, but ultimately you need to get into the hard details to determine where you can improve. Different ad copy, audiences, search phrases and target products will most likely all have different results.

By analyzing performance results separately, we can then determine where growth is declining, where conversion rates are highest, and which audience segments are responsible for different revenue growth rates.

Final Words

Paid search projections can be difficult to accurately predict. Luckily we can simplify the process by taking advantage of both quantitative and human analysis, providing us with the ability to come up with forecasts based on real, hard, and complete data.

Once your forecast is complete, make sure to test it against actual performance and compare the results; you’ll likely find even more ways to iterate and refine your forecasting process.